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Tavor rifles slung over their shoulders, groups of young IDF recruits wander through Tel Aviv’s Israel Museum at the Yitzhak Rabin Centre. It is the day Israel marks the 20th anniversary of the former prime minister’s assassination, but — save for their weaponry and uniforms — these teenagers still resemble the pupils they so recently were, on a school visit. Some pay rapt attention as their guide talks them through the museum’s displays — which simultaneously tell the life of the war-hero-turned-politician, as well as the history of the state he fought to establish and then safeguard — others rather less so.
Today’s visitors are part of the 40,000 IDF soldiers, officers and commanders who have taken part over the past 14 years in the centre’s Sensitivity Programme for Security Personnel, which sets out to create “greater awareness of the values fundamental to a democratic society”.
Many of those first participants in 2001 will have remembered Rabin’s premiership and the night Yigal Amir brutally ended it with three bullets fired at close range. But for the soldiers visiting the museum today, born after his death, Rabin is a figure of history.
History this may be, but few can have missed its many contemporary echoes. Pass the images of the beaches, buildings and culture of Tel Aviv’s ‘‘White City’’ in which Rabin grew up during the 1920s and 1930s, and darker themes emerge: amid the tales of the frequent sparks of violence which occurred during this period before igniting in the Arab Revolt of 1936 is a description of Jews being randomly stabbed in attacks designed to spread fear and terror.
Unsurprisingly, conflict between Jews and Arabs is a running theme, and at all the key moments — fighting to keep open the road to the besieged city of Jerusalem during the war of independence; defeating Egypt, Syria and Jordan in less than a week as the IDF’s chief of staff two decades later; and, a further 20 years after that, vowing as defence minister to crush the first intifada — Rabin was there.
But, as the angry exchanges during last week’s Knesset session commemorating Rabin’s death graphically underlined — the Netanyahu years have left deep divisions within Israeli society, such fissures are hardly new. Images of the Wadi Salib riots in 1959 illustrate the discrimination against working-class Mizrachi Jews at the hands of the hegemonic, Ashkenazi-dominated Labour party, which was eventually to play a key part in the left’s dramatic ejection from government in 1977.
War and peace marked Menachem Begin’s premiership and both left Israelis deeply divided: the museum documents Israel’s descent into the quagmire of Lebanon in 1982 and the resultant discontent both at home — one peace activist, Emil Grunzweig, was famously murdered when a grenade was thrown into a rally protesting against the Sabra and Shatila massacre — and, indeed, in the field.
Footage shows Begin airily dismissing the public resignation of an IDF officer, as well as the reactions of members of the company he left behind: they, too, disagree with one another about the actions of their former comrade and the war they are fighting.
Rabin, who abandoned his early support for the invasion as he saw the IDF bogged down in “Lebanese mud”, is seen addressing a meeting and asking what duties the state could legitimately ask its “citizens’ army” to perform.
Peace came at a price, too. After the optimism that accompanied the signing of the Camp David Accords in 1979, came the trauma three years later of the evacuation of the Israeli settlement at Yamit in Sinai: contemporary TV news reports show IDF soldiers dragging residents from their homes.
Rabin’s relationship with the settlement movement was paradoxical. Although against settlements in areas with Arab populations, and initially sending in the IDF to stop them, he eventually approved the Kedumim settlement in Samaria. As the museum commentary notes: “The road was thus paved for the settlement movement that he had opposed, to march on.”
Under Oslo during his second premiership, these themes were to recur: the optimism engendered by Rabin shaking hands with Yasser Arafat in 1993, and King Hussein a year later, drained both by Palestinian suicide bombings and the ferocious opposition of the Israeli right and settlers.
Some of that opposition undoubtedly crossed the boundaries of legitimate criticism. As a section entitled “Incitement” reminds visitors, Rabin was portrayed as a Nazi and denounced as a traitor. As leader of the opposition, Netanyahu did little to police those boundaries.
Thus the current prime minister, who is — entirely legitimately — so vocal in his opposition to Palestinian incitement comes off as passive bystander in the face of rhetoric which, as the museum notes, “was taken by extremists as a licence to kill”.
This may seem a curious impression to impart to those who are about to be asked to put their lives at risk.
But that surely is the point. Whatever its faults, Israeli democracy is resilient enough to choose, quite deliberately, to expose its young military recruits not only to tales of its people’s heroic struggles for independence and survival, but also to the controversies and disputes which continue, deeply, to divide them.
